A Department of Transport plan to save £57m by moving to shared services - using centralised facilities for some business functions like HR - has ended up costing £87m.
The system was examined by the National Audit Office in May which famously found the system barking orders at staff in German, failing to account for weekends …

Considerably worse than that even!

Elsewhere reported. The original plan was to spend 55 million and produce savings of 112 million. An overall net saving of 57 million.

It's actually ended up costing (and this is still a forecast - they're not finished yet) 121 million with savings dropping to 40 million. So the 81 million figure quoted is a net cost *including* the predicted savings.

@ John Oates

hmmmm anyone else sick of this kind of thing?

this should now be considered a criminal matter. ffs im sick of our tax money etc being thrown away. so it costs them £81m to save ~£50m. i wonder if anyone involved has any connections to the big blue? why wasnt it specced properly. how the fuck can a system cost £81m??

Ha-ha!

That would be hysterically funny if it wasn't OUR money that these bumbling idiots are wasting. The public sector should be banned from undertaking any sort of project that involves computers or data management. It's a foregone conclusion that as soon as they start a project it will end with failure, go seriously over budget, or become dreadfully late, or a combination of 2 or all 3.

It's shameful that they didn't follow the correct procedure to offer the project out to tender. Quite possibly a reputable private company that could have delivered the desired saving has lost out.

Das Ver Good!

A rousing success then

As I've learned from my current employer the definition of "success" for major IT project is somewhat like the definition of "theory" in the scientific community. I.e. what you use the term for in day to day conversation is nothing like how it's used in specialised areas.

Famously one project I worked on had a party to celebrate it's "success" over a year ago. The project is still not complete and has in fact been closed down so can never deliver on it's promises. The people involved in the planning of it have all been promoted out of harms way and the whole matter conveniently forgotten about.

If this level of incompetence and lies is possible in a large financial organisation (under regulatory oversight no less) then image how incompetent public servants can be and still get away with it.

Re: Hmmm...

"this article contains no surprises"

Having also seen the project on the ground I'm surprised that the report isn't more critical.

What is worrying is why neither the NAO nor PAC took a look at the project sooner. Two years ago when I spent three days in Swansea it was clear that it was badly managed. The timescales for the installation of the equipment were just dates in a chart and had no connection to reality. So people turned up to install and configure systems only to discover the boxes hadn't been delivered.

cluster f*ckery ;o) love'd it

so, the committee reckons it's, "one of the worst cases of project management seen" by them.... holy crap - there's some incredibly strong competition out there for that awespicious title; I too am well impressed... and all for just £24million eh?

re: how the fuck can a system cost £81m??

No idea of the real cost

Those in government and the civil service have no idea of what the real cost of the money they are wasting in this case and countless others.

It is the equivalent of taking the tax paid by everyone in my company over their entire working lives, and setting fire to it, just for the hell of it.

You'd like to think that your taxes go to pay for hospitals, schools and even defence of the realm, but in reality a good proportion of us struggle throughout our lives to pay taxes only to fund gross incompetence and corruption.

@Al

So...

P'shaw

Oh, p'shaw. I live in Massachusetts. We've got the Big Dig. You haven't seen "stupendous incompetence" until you've seen that. If you're upset after your civil servants needlessly cost you £40m, imagine how we feel knowing the idiots in charge of the Big Dig have cost us over £5b? The estimate a couple years ago was that it was over-budget by $11,000,000,000. I'm sure we'd love it if our civil servants only screwed us out of $80,000,000.

@Al

Re: P'shaw

I don't think the Big Dig is a fair comparison. The massive cost overruns on the Big Dig did have some help from criminality. Billing for things you deliberately didn't deliver is in a different league from shipping systems that the DVLA lost in goods-inwards.

And anyway, the citizens of Boston got a nice new hole in the ground. And sometimes they can drive along it. The DfT systems are all internal and provide nothing to us citizens. In fact we'd be better off if they had merely spent the money on a huge party.

@Chris C

Don't worry lads, I've got an idea...

Instead of paying out millions to a few overpaid monkeys with Microsoft certificates and BOFH excuse calendars they bought off eBay, use a small sum of it to hire a few of the newly-liberated (re: Unemployed), and do everything manually. Information can be transported from site-to-site by transit vans.